Artis Frank rubs his face during the last leg of his commute on a DART bus.

(
Nathan Hunsinger
-
Staff Photographer
)

Artis Frank walks home after his last stop on DART. He walks and takes the DART bus and train to commute.

(
Nathan Hunsinger
-
Staff Photographer
)

Artis Frank settled in Tuesday on the DART Green Line rail car, ear buds dangling from underneath his knit cap, backpack nestled at his side. The 59-year-old South Dallas resident was on the third leg of his four-part trek home from work. His commute: bus, commuter rail, light rail, another bus.

Frank has worked in marketing and sales and wants better, steady work. But without a car, he’s limited to jobs he can find along DART train and bus lines that run through 13 sprawling cities. That means the better-paying jobs he sees in cities like Arlington and Mesquite are out.

His daily commute — two hours each way — hasn’t been going on long. He recently started working at Northgate United Methodist Church in central Irving, helping in the childcare center and doing whatever other jobs may be needed.

A car could provide faster access to a better job, but loan payments, maintenance and insurance would eat away at salary gains. So it makes more financial sense to Frank to live near a DART bus line and find work close to public transit.

“It’s cheaper to do this right here than to have some raggedy old car,” he said.

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That’s how life goes along the poverty line in car-centric cities like Dallas, whose 20th-century growth birthed highways that became developmental skeletons for suburbs where the middle class have fled for decades. Left behind is an urban core with housing and socioeconomic problems — and infrastructure built for cars that many poor people can’t afford.

City officials and outside experts say that Dallas — about to embark on a sweeping plan to improve neighborhoods — needs to consider more transportation options for the poor.

Dallas officials last month released a report that sounded the alarm on the city’s crisis-level poverty, declining number of middle-income residents and housing stock that is out of line with what people can afford. That study found that 1 in 5 Dallas families in 2012 lived below the poverty line, which at the time was an annual income of $23,050 for a family of four.

“I knew it wasn’t great, but I didn’t realize it was that bad,” said John Rossant, founder of the New Cities Foundation, a Paris-based group whose annual international summit on “the future of the urban world” was held in Dallas last year.

City Hall report

City Hall’s report, called Neighborhood Plus, was the tiniest of first steps in the ambitious plan to stem the poverty that is linked with property values, education, health care, crime, social mobility and other quality-of-life issues.

It calls for implementing a $10.25-an-hour minimum wage, partnering with private companies and nonprofit organizations and empowering individual neighborhoods to identify their own biggest barriers to climbing out of poverty.

Rossant and other experts, who reviewed the report for The Dallas Morning News, hail the efforts. But they — along with residents and top city officials — say that planners are going to have to offer people more than roads for getting to and from work, school, medical appointments and grocery stores.

“It’s about really wanting to begin the process of looking at things differently,” said City Manager A.C. Gonzalez, who says the initiative will dramatically overhaul how City Hall operates. “It’s as much a change of our culture as it is about problem-solving and design.”

Some of the potential solutions are aligned with the urban planning philosophies that have prompted scores of Dallasites to oppose theTrinity Parkway toll road and support the tear down of Interstate 345.

Nobody wanted to work or live near elevated highways 40 years ago and they still don’t today,” said Matt Tranchin, executive director ofCoalition for a New Dallas, a political action committee advocating for I-345’s removal.

Just don’t expect Gonzalez to jump on the bandwagons circling either of those projects, which have become highly politicized in the Mayelections that will seat Gonzalez’s 15 bosses at the City Council horseshoe.

“I don’t want to get bogged down on any one particular project,” Gonzalez said.

‘Cash car’

It’s that time of year when income tax returns start hitting mailboxes. Meagan Gaddis plans to use hers to buy a car. She’s been looking for a “cash car” that’s dependable enough to get her around the city.

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The DART train ride from east Oak Cliff to a minimum-wage job she recently held at a downtown drug store wasn’t so bad — about 10 minutes. But when she had to take her three kids to a relative’s house, she had to use a combination of buses and trains to drop them off and get to work.

That could take another 90 minutes — and more on weekends if she steps off a train to find that a connecting bus has just left.

“And then I have to wait a whole other hour for the bus to come,” she said. “It’s really bad.”

Gaddis’ car isn’t about getting around quicker in the life she has, though. It’s about improving her job prospects. She plans to enroll at Remington College in Garland so she can be a medical assistant. Using public transit to juggle education, child care and work would be too cumbersome.

“It would take me like two-and-a-half hours to come back, and then I’d have to go to work,” she said.

Pedestrian-friendly

Benjamin Ross, who wrote Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism, said that the need for a car makes it harder to climb out of poverty. Vehicle maintenance and upkeep can sometimes match living expenses.

“If there are jobs in the city — if you can just make them more accessible to people, you can make the city more livable and more affordable,” said Ross, who is also an environmental consultant and public transit advocate.

According to a recent University of Minnesota study, Dallas-Fort Worth ranks fifth among American metropolitan regions for total employment. But the area ranked 20th for the number of jobs accessible within 10 minutes of public transit. Overall, Dallas-Fort Worth ranked 16th for the number of jobs accessible by transit within at least an hour.

But experts, residents and officials agree that a more robust and efficient transit system isn’t the only answer. Denser infill developments are, too, they say. Mixed-income housing within close proximity to job centers, schools and stores could eliminate the need for dependence on not only cars but also transit.

“Walking is probably the most energy efficient way of getting around and doing stuff,” said Gonzalez, the city manager.

Making an entire city more pedestrian-friendly in a city built for cars, however, will be a massive and expensive undertaking. Dallas officials likely would have to overhaul zoning ordinances, entice private developers to build developments that particular neighborhoods want and put more thought into sidewalk connectivity in a city already behind on road upkeep.

DART officials are already in the middle of looking at a possible overhaul to its bus service. The agency is currently reviewing large amounts of data that detail who rides the routes, when, where they come from and where they go.

President and executive director Gary Thomas said agency officials don’t want to leave areas with minimal service, but also don’t want people forced to wait at stops for long periods of time as they try to get to work or run errands.

“That’s the balance you have – where do you put your resources?” Thomas said. “Do you try and cover as much space and as much land as you possibly can or do you try to maximize those routes you know that are heavily traveled?”

Giving options

Dallas hasn’t gotten to the cost of needs or funding for Neighborhoods Plus. Gonzalez wants to first put together partnerships among City Hall, DART, private companies, charitable groups and individual neighborhoods. It’s going to be a long process, he warns, and the push has only just begun.

“This is not something that you snap some fingers and all of a sudden it’s different,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez said one neighborhood may want better access to health care, while another decides that healthier food options need to be within reach. Still another could have problems with crime, vacant lots and illegal dumping.

Rossant commended Gonzalez and the city for “coming to grips” with the issues facing its residents. He said the only way such a plan will work is if everything is attacked holistically.

“Clearly they’re asking all the right questions,” Rossant said.

When it comes to connectivity, Gonzalez said the goal isn’t to put one mode of transportation over another. It’s about giving residents mobility options.

“Cars are wonderful, but they’re very expensive in terms of their impact on the environment and the cost that it takes to maintain them and to keep them up,” Gonzalez said. “But they’re wonderfully convenient.”

The tradeoffs

On Tuesday, Frank rode DART’s Green Line quietly as a woman talked loudly on her phone and a young man in khakis chatted up a young woman who had been sitting alone.

Frank had caught a bus at 7:30 a.m. to make it to the MLK Jr. Station to catch the Green Line. He transferred to the TRE at Victory Park Station and rode the commuter train to West Irving Station. From there, it was another bus up to Northgate in central Irving.

Sometimes he waits 20 minutes to make connections in order to be to the church job by 9:30 a.m. During Thursday’s snow, however, there was an even longer wait to get home.

Frank’s route to work wasn’t interrupted by DART’s closure of outlying stations for weather-related reasons. But when he got to the church, the building was closed. A pastor had an emergency and the building superintendent wasn’t there.

So after two hours traveling to Irving, Frank waited an hour for the next bus to begin his two-hour journey back home.